Legitimation Strategies Research Articles

The Case of the Killer She-Wolf

In July 1974, a she-wolf allegedly killed two children in Ourense (Spain). A press outburst followed, with a heated debate about the extermination or conservation of wolf populations. This article examines that media coverage as a highly illustrative example of a multilayered process of natural history knowledge construction. The initial focus on the legal standing of wolves soon turned to an argument about Spain’s modernization, a central contention during Franco’s dictatorship, particularly in the last two decades. In a context of the rise of the natural sciences as a noteworthy field of sociopolitical negotiation worldwide, the scientific definition and management of natural heritage, intertwined with nationalist and internationalist rationales that were integral to the regime’s enduring legitimation strategies, quickly became central issues. In addition, Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente (1928–1980), a highly influential naturalist, media icon, and celebrity champion of wolves, whose stance of a scientifically based activism elicited mixed feelings in late Franco’s Spain, was quickly drawn into the quarrel with shepherds, hunters, scholars, policymakers, and journalists. His involvement, against a backdrop of locally situated and environmentally related conflicts, allows us to analyze the ambivalent role of science, media, and celebrity in the establishment of the epistemological status of local/rural and outsider/urban knowledge in the construction of narratives about nature. In all, this case brings together official mechanisms of production of scientific knowledge, various forms of public and institutional engagement, a wide range of people’s everyday-life experiences, and the crucial involvement of the media.

Predicting the likelihood of airspace user rerouting to mitigate air traffic flow management delay

At present, the most common air traffic flow management measure used by the European Network Manager to solve en-route demand and capacity balance issues is to impose air traffic flow management regulations in congested airspace, which delay flights on the ground to smooth demand. The delay imposed on a regulated flight, however, has a negative operational and economic impact on the corresponding airspace user. When the impact is severe, the airspace user may reroute the flight to tactically circumvent the regulated airspace, thereby avoiding the regulation and reducing (or even eliminating) the delay. This legitimate strategy is unquestionably effective in mitigating the delay and the associated cost, but it may also increases traffic demand uncertainty due to last-minute changes as well as the environmental impact due to sub-optimal trajectories. This paper presents a gradient-boosted decision trees model that, trained on historical data, could assist in predicting the likelihood of a regulated flight rerouting to mitigate air traffic flow management delay. Specific metrics for highly imbalanced binary classification problems reveal that, while not perfect, the model outperforms a rudimentary decision tree and a dummy classifier. Furthermore, Shapley values computed with the model uncover the most important triggers for tactical rerouting from a data-driven perspective, namely the current delay, the aircraft operator, the airspace sector where the most penalising regulation is applied and the remaining time until departure. This interpretable model could be used to assist flow managers in their decision-making, as well as to accurately mimic the behaviour of flight dispatchers when facing delays in simulators.

A Not-So-Simple Noodle Story

Begun in 2000, China’s Great Western Development Campaign (GWDC) sought to reinforce party-state legitimation narratives by extending economic development to peripheral regions often populated by ethnic minorities. In extending aid to minority communities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted narratives about its own provision of stability and prosperity, and endeavored to exert further control over the conduct of ethnic politics. However, while this subsidization of development in minority communities produced macro-level success, it also contributed to fragmentation of ethnic identity and perpetuation of instability in daily interactions. In this article, I examine the CCP’s attempt to subsidize the creation of a branded ethnic economy around the production of handmade noodles (lamian) in ethnic Hui communities in rural Qinghai Province. I argue that while the state’s investment in lamian did increase income in Hui communities, the migration that accompanied this developmental aid led to increased contestation of the boundaries of Hui identity and contributed to marginalization and alienation of the Hui migrants involved. I argue that these consequences stemming from the funding of the lamian economy allow the CCP to effect greater control through channeling measures. However, such measures also illuminate the limitations of performance-based legitimation strategies which justify the implementation of ever-increasing measures of control that risk overreach.

Sustaining Legitimacy of Unrecognized Statehood: How Turkish Cypriot Elites Cope with Internal and External Challenges

ABSTRACT This article scrutinizes Turkish Cypriot elites’ legitimation strategies of sustaining internal legitimacy in the absence of international recognition and coping with challenges rising from the international context, parent state’s pressure and patron state’s meddling. The article links the sustainability of North Cyprus’ unrecognized statehood to two major factors. Firstly, parent’s counter-recognition policies and despair of repeatedly failing negotiations result in a backlash among Turkish Cypriots, forging internal unity. Secondly, the degree of political pluralism allows peaceful transfer of power amongst various elite groups, resulting in use of diverse and often conflicting legitimation strategies to better cope with legitimacy challenges.

Populism and Transnational Projection: The Legitimation Strategies of Pink Tide Neo-Populist Leaderships in Latin America

Abstract This article attempts to engage the burgeoning research on the transnational dimensions of populism with recent theorization on legitimation strategies in international politics. Focusing on the performative practices of the wave of Pink Tide neo-populist leaders in Latin America (also called “Chavista” or “Bolivarian”), this work identifies three main strategies of legitimation – affective, normative, and institutional – and tracks their transnational resonance. Indications of these strategies include the extrapolation of strong emotional attachments with supporters abroad, the empowerment of identity-based solidarities, and the reconstruction of regionalist projects. Their drive to mobilize transnational support has been complemented by a normative flipside – the discursive attack on rival “anti-national” elites and the readiness to use national revenues for demonstrating solidarity with international allies. Analysis details how these strategies projected the populists’ legitimacy onto the regional and global arena. This inquiry may contribute policy-oriented hindsight on the rise of populists worldwide and their potential effects on transnational practices of cooperation and defiance, primarily on regional integration, global governance, and international conflicts.

“Either You Need Me, or I’m Leaving!” How Sustainability Managers Influence the Legitimacy Process

Legitimacy is an important prerequisite for any occupational group and the result of a complex social process. This holds especially true in contested contexts such as sustainability transformation within organizations. However, legitimacy research has so far almost exclusively referred to organizations and strategies for achieving legitimacy have been studied separately from this process. We address this gap by examining the legitimacy strategies of 30 sustainability managers from corporate and public organizations using semi-structured interviews. We embed our empirical findings in a model which builds on the legitimacy process and incorporates eight effect mechanisms reflecting the different legitimacy dimensions. In doing so, we consider the process as well as the perception perspective of legitimacy and show that the strategies used to achieve legitimacy affect different parts of the legitimacy process depending on the underlying effect mechanism. For researchers, this insight opens possibilities for more specific inquiry with respect to the effectiveness of legitimacy strategies. For those representing new occupations in search of legitimacy, the findings point to potential areas of application for legitimacy strategies.

Professional capital and social work futures: Contemporary challenges for Australian social work

Abstract The future of social work preoccupies scholars and educators in the field, with consideration periodically extending beyond ‘trends’ to the fundamental question of whether social work per se even has a future. A recurring theme in these debates concerns social work’s professional project, and whether professionalisation enhances or undermines social work’s values and aims. Whilst contributing to the conceptual articulation of a social work habitus, few of these contributions are informed by the views of practitioners in the field. This article analyses 122 practitioners’ perspectives on current issues for social work, through data taken from a survey conducted in Victoria, Australia in 2018. Practitioners’ perspectives are analysed in relation to the theoretical construct of professional capital. In contrast to modernist interpretations of professionalisation-as-status typical of polemical works, a professional capital perspective construes social work’s professional project as a legitimation strategy, the primary aim of which is to secure recognition of the unique view of the social world which informs social work practice. From that perspective, arguments against professionalisation misrecognise the role professionalisation plays in securing social work’s future, unwittingly placing its future in jeopardy.

MNEs’ CSR Decoupling: How Host-Country Stakeholder Pressures Matter

The literature suggests that organizations tend to use corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a means to establish and enhance legitimacy, particularly when they operate internationally. Meanwhile, organizations that adopt voluntary CSR initiatives, such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), may decouple symbolic CSR claims from actual CSR performance. Despite extensive research on organizational decoupling and the legitimation strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs), we have limited understanding of how host-country conditions affect MNEs’ CSR decoupling. Building on the idea of decoupling in institutional theory and the research on corporate adoption of voluntary codes of conduct, this paper analyzes how host-country stakeholder pressures will discourage CSR decoupling of MNEs that adopt the UNGC. We also identify possible contingencies, host country press freedom, and institutional and normative distances between home and host countries, and investigate how they moderate MNEs’ responses to host-country stakeholder pressures. We test our theory using an international sample of the UNGC signatories during the period 2007-2018. Our main analyses rely on a dataset containing 4,359 observations for 305 listed firms from 36 home countries, with negative CSR events (i.e., corporate violations of the UNGC principles) taking place in 117 host countries. The results support our predictions.

Aggression and Banter as (de)legitimisation Strategies in Political Debate

Political debate is an emerging culture in Nigerian politics, aimed at fostering popular democracy, and presenting candidates to electorates to make their choice. But it is likewise a platform for exchanging cynic comments and banters, especially between the contestants, most of the two dominant political parties in Nigeria, the All-Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). This has not been sufficiently researched in studies on political discourse. Extant studies have focused on campaign speeches, acceptance, and concession speeches, among others, using speech acts, socio-stylistics, and critical discourse analysis. This study investigates the comments and rebuttals of Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu of the APC, and Governor Godwin Obaseki of the PDP, in the 2020 Edo Governorship Debate. It adopts implicature, explicature and pragmatic acts as theories to, qualitatively, analyse the downloaded and transcribed excerpts from Channels Television’s website, where they were televised to reach millions of people, both in local and international spaces. The results show that both conventional and conversational implicature, and explicature were employed by both aspirants to achieve party and self legitimisation, supremacism, cynicism, and criticism. These are used as campaign strategies. The study concludes that the contestants in the Edo 2020 political debate made it about themselves and their parties. Aggression is initiated and managed as a debate-campaign strategy to canvas for the electorates’ votes.

From our sisters/to our sisters

Abstract Since the proclamation of the Caliphate in 2014, an unprecedented number of women have fled to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS). This fact, a matter of national security for many countries, has spotlighted the two major official propaganda magazines of the organisation, Dabiq and Rumiyah, since both publications are considered potential recruitment tools. This paper studies the sections addressed to women in the aforementioned magazines to find out: (a) the roles of women within IS as depicted by the two official propaganda channels and (b) the legitimation strategies used by the organisation to justify their claims. To reach these aims, I will study the data considering the legitimation models proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Reyes (2011). The analysis will unveil the ideal type of woman any Muslim female joining the armed group should aspire to become.

TAX AMENDMENT LEGAL POLICY TO SUPPORT STATE FINANCIAL INCOME

Public advancement that means to further develop individuals' government assistance requires a huge improvement spending plan. One of the endeavors to acknowledge improvement is to investigate wellsprings of assets that come from charges and are executed as government approaches. Charge absolution is an option in contrast to gathering state income. The issue; For what reason does the public authority complete an expense pardon lawful strategy to help state monetary pay for the government assistance of individuals? How is the execution of the duty absolution legitimate strategy to the local area in supporting state monetary pay for the government assistance of individuals? Research strategy through standardizing and exact exploration. The outcomes charge absolution strategy can profit from getting reserves, particularly the arrival of assets kept abroad. Endeavors to extend the expense object up until this point have not been sought after so that individuals can willfully cover their assessments. The duty pardon strategy is supposed to increment both assessment subjects and expense objects. The object of the assessment can be as the arrival of assets living abroad, while the expense subject can be as an expansion in the quantity of citizens.
 Since the execution of the assessment reprieve, the aftereffects of the duty pardon statement, the execution of the expense absolution interest can be pronounced fruitful. There are four signs of progress in view of the creator's discoveries. In the first place, the high open interest in this program. Second, the quantity of assets announced. Third, this figure shows that numerous citizens, particularly confidential people (business visionaries) are engaged with concealing resources so as not to be identified by the duty framework in Indonesia. Fourth, the low degree of assets beginning from unfamiliar resource statements and bringing home shows that the fundamental target of the assessment acquittal program to pull out assets from Indonesian residents abroad has not been accomplished as expected

Applying a Commercial Determinants of Health Lens to Understand, Expose and Counter Industry Co-option, Appeasement and Partnership Comment on "'Part of the Solution': Food Corporation Strategies for Regulatory Capture and Legitimacy".

Lacy-Nichols and Williams' examination of the food industry illustrates how it altered its approach from mostly oppositional to regulation to one of appeasement and co-option. This reflection builds upon this by using a commercial determinants of health (CDoH) lens to understand, expose and counter industry co-option, appeasement and partnership strategies that impact public health. Lessons learned from tobacco reveal how tobacco companies maintained public credibility by recruiting scientists to produce industry biased data, co-opting public health groups, gaining access to policy elites and sitting on important government regulatory bodies. Potential counter solutions to food industry appeasement and co-option include (i) understanding corporate actions of health harming industries, (ii) applying mechanisms to minimize industry engagement, (iii) dissecting industry relationship building, and (iv) exposing the negative effects of public private partnerships (PPPs). Such counter-solutions might help to neutralise harmful industry practices, products and policies which currently threaten to undermine healthy food policies.

Resisting anti-democratic values with misogynistic abuse against a Chilean right-wing politician on Twitter: The #CamilaPeluche incident

This paper explores abuse received by a Chilean right-wing female politician in tweets produced with the #CamilaPeluche hashtag, which aimed to shame her sexually. The data considers the period of 22 days since the creation and spread of the hashtag, which took place 5 days into the 2019 uprising in Chile. This paper follows a corpus-based critical discourse analysis that examines the most frequently used adjectives, that is, predication strategies, that characterise the politician, as well as their (de)legitimating function through the identification of van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies. Results showed that what started as gendered aggression evolved towards a focus on social class and political stance due to the politician’s characteristics and those of the sociohistorical context where the aggressions originated. Furthermore, it was found that the politician’s anti-democratic values were used to justify abuse against her, presenting it as reasonable.

Repression Reconsidered: Bystander Effects and Legitimation in Authoritarian Regimes

Research on repression has primarily focused on its destructive potential, namely how violence serves to eliminate threats. This article proposes an alternative role for repres- sion: to build popular support. I argue that repression builds support for an autocratic regime when it targets groups perceived as dangerous. I refer to this phenomenon as a legitimation strategy of repression, which aims to gain the support of civilian bystanders beyond eliminating threats. To test the argument, I present a case study of state repression in Egypt after the 2013 coup. I explain how repression against the Muslim Brotherhood helped build popular support for the new regime. My findings contribute to scholarship on authoritarianism and repression by demonstrating the oft-overlooked role of civilian bystanders in shaping state violence.

Responding to Food Industry Initiatives to Be "Part of the Solution" Comment on "'Part of the Solution': Food Corporation Strategies for Regulatory Capture and Legitimacy".

In response to growing concerns about chronic diseases, food insecurity, low-wage food labor, and global warming, the food industry has developed new strategies to respond to its critics and pursue its business and political goals. As Lacy-Nicholas and Williams described in a recent review, the food industry has expanded its repertoire from opposition to critics to appeasement, co-option, and partnerships.1 Defining themselves as "part of the solution," the food industry seeks to disarm its opponents, shift policy debates to favor its interests, or delay decisions that jeopardize its profits or power. This commentary explores how health professionals, can respond to this changing repertoire. Lessons from previous campaigns to control harmful industry practices,2 suggest that no single strategy will counter changing food industry efforts to achieve its goals. Thus, advocates must consider a portfolio of approaches that can be deployed in response to changing circumstances, industry tactics, and threats to health.

THE DISCURSIVE LEGITIMATION OF THE EU-TURKEY REFUGEE DEAL IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This study explores the legitimation strategies employed in European political discourse on EU’s migration
 cooperation with Turkey. More specifically, this paper elucidates factors that shape argumentation in
 European parliamentary debates on 18 March 2016 EU-Turkey Statement, also known as the EU-Turkey
 Refugee Deal. Adopting an interdisciplinary research methodology rooted in Critical Discourse Analysis
 and using analytical tools of Cognitive Linguistics, this study aims to provide empirical insights into the
 legitimation of migration and asylum policies. This study connects to the growing body of literature on
 discursive legitimation in an attempt to extend the existing set of categories of legitimation proposed in
 earlier studies.

DISCOURSE, KNOWLEDGE AND (HETERO)PATRIARCHY: A CASE STUDY OF THE HONOUR KILLING OF QANDEEL BALOCH

This study employs a Feminist Epistemic Discourse analysis of the Facebook comments posted by social media users in Pakistan in response to the honour killing of a social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch. The study focuses on misogynist and sexist knowledge and practices of knowledge dissemination, where information is condensed and interpersonally charged through (de)legitimation strategies which embody hegemonised heteropatriarchal ideologies and values. To represent and synthesise people’s misogynist and sexist knowledge, and to justify the honour killing of Baloch, the social media users make use of selective knowledge constructed from the combinations of various popular discourses, supported by the references to selected religious scripture. This study is a part of a more detailed study on Gendered Epistemic Discourse Analysis (GEDA) which aims to focus on the relationship between discourse, knowledge and heteropatriarchy. Such studies will provide deeper insights into socio-cultural contexts where honour killing is practiced, and facilitate further development of feminist approaches to discourse, knowledge and socio-cultural context.

Mythopoesis as a legitimation strategy in discourse

Mythopoesis as a legitimation strategy in discourse

Envisioning legitimacy: visual dimensions of NGO annual reports

PurposeThis paper explores the communication of legitimacy in the annual reports of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focusing specifically on the function of images. The visual mode of discourse and meaning construction has to date only scarcely been explored in legitimacy research, especially in the NGO context.Design/methodology/approachDistinguishing between normative, regulatory, cognitive and outcome legitimacy, the paper inquires into the kinds of legitimacy that NGOs communicate to their constituents and the claims that predominate. Turning to research on impression management, the paper explores whether and how organizations use images as symbolic mechanisms of legitimacy. Finally, the paper considers the socio-cultural implications of these legitimation strategies for beneficiary groups, donor communities and the organizations themselves.FindingsA qualitative content analysis of images in the reports of the eight influential members of the US-based Global Emergency Response Coalition confirms the widespread presence of legitimacy claims in NGO visual communications, with normative (especially need) and output (especially implementation) categories predominating. However, these practices are potentially contradictory; measures to increase legitimacy to and of donors result in forms of beneficiary exclusion and reduction. Strategies of impression management, namely self-promotion, ingratiation and exemplification, appear to shape these NGO representative logics.Originality/valueThe results of this study extend prior research into legitimacy, legitimation and impression management in and beyond the non-governmental sector by differentiating among categories of legitimacy and incorporating images as the object of analysis. In this capacity, they also support and augment the emerging literature on imagery use in NGO annual reports.

G-group legitimacy in global governance: rightful membership of rising powers?

The shift in global policymaking from the Group of Seven (G7) to the Group of Twenty (G20) is widely seen to reflect the rise to power of emerging markets in the South. It begs the question, though, whether the G20 has the right membership to legitimately govern the global economy. This paper applies a novel framework linking rightful membership to global governance institutions’ roles to address this question. A longitudinal analysis of (1) financial and economic indicators of G-group members; (2) their global ranking on these indicators; and (3) the position of G-group members in technical forums of financial governance demonstrates that the shift to the G20 was necessary to maintain rightful membership given the declining share of G7 members in the global economy. However, rightful membership as a source of legitimacy varies across G-group roles and diffuses across roles and across global governance institutions. These new insights demonstrate the added value of conceptualising rightful membership in relation to different roles of global governance institutions. The analytical framework proposed in this paper allows for better insights into the legitimation strategies and public legitimacy perceptions of global governance institutions, and points to interesting new hypotheses with respect to the legitimacy of global governance institutions.